Journalists practice social distancing as they listen to Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, March 13 in Arlington, Virginia, at a briefing at the Pentagon. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

On Wednesday afternoon, Lynn Ungar — minister, dog trainer, little-known poet — sat down at the desk next to her kitchen table and began to type.

A friend had posted something on Facebook about how much we need poetry in this anxious coronavirus age and she thought, “Yeah, you’re right.”

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Ungar had been thinking about social distancing, the idea that to keep the virus from spreading we need to stay away from one another. She’d been reflecting on a question: How do we physically distance ourselves without emotional distancing? In this strange and befuddling moment, she thought, we need to recognize that moving away from other people isn’t an act of emotional disconnection but the opposite: It’s something to do out of a sense of community and compassion for the vulnerable.

And so, with her two Australian shepherds by her side, she spent a little while turning her thoughts into a poem. When she was done, she typed her name and the date at the bottom and posted it on Facebook for her small following of friends and colleagues. It went like this:

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Pandemic

What if you thought of it

as the Jews consider the Sabbath —

the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.

Cease from buying and selling.

Give up, just for now,

on trying to make the world

different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those

to whom you commit your life.

Center down.

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.

And when your body has become still,

reach out with your heart.

Know that we are connected

in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.)

Know that our lives

are in one another’s hands.

(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.

Reach out your heart.

Reach out your words.

Reach out all the tendrils

of compassion that move, invisibly,

where we cannot touch.

.

Promise this world your love —

for better or for worse,

in sickness and in health,

so long as we all shall live.

— Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

Within a few hours, “Pandemic” had gone viral.

I discovered it when it floated repeatedly through my Facebook feed. A South Carolina cousin emailed it to me. The well-known writer Rebecca Solnit was among the thousands who shared it.

“Best thing I’ve read all day” and “I needed this” and “Healing” were typical of the responses.

But who was Lynn Ungar, who had written what may be the first viral poem about the coronavirus age? I wondered, so on Friday I went in search of her.

“A viral poem about a virus,” she said when I tracked her down by phone. “That’s funny in a twisted kind of way.”

Ungar, who’s 56, lives in Castro Valley, California, just south of Oakland. It turns out that in the 1990s she lived in Chicago, where she was the minister of Second Unitarian Church in the Lakeview neighborhood. It was in Chicago that she adopted her daughter, who’s now grown. These days, she’s a minister for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, which the web site (questformeaning.org) describes as an online congregation of Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals.

Ungar is also Jewish, and thinking about the behavioral restrictions imposed by the Jewish Sabbath helped to shape her poem.

“We generally think of restrictions as being a negative,” she said. “But the idea of the Sabbath is that accepting these restrictions — you can’t exchange money, drive a car, work — can be a spiritual discipline that is a source of beauty, a source of the holy, as opposed to just being a pain in the ass.”

The outpouring in response to “Pandemic” (which she gave the Tribune permission to use) has moved Ungar. She particularly appreciated the thank-you from a rabbi who’s a chaplain in a home for the elderly. His job is to comfort others and he was grateful to have her poem to sustain him.

“Somebody working at a large home for the elderly, that’s ground zero,” she said. She was glad that people like him — the medical personnel and "all the people really doing the hard work” — found some comfort in her words.

“I have very few useful skills, right?” she said. “I am good at writing poetry and training dogs. You do not want me at a medical emergency.”